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Amazon AWS Goes Down Again, Takes Reddit With It

Today’s not a good day for Amazon. Not only is it facing claims that the company wiped a customer’s Kindle, but now several websites that use Amazon’s AWS cloud-computing service for hosting, including Reddit, Coursera, Flipboard, FastCompany, Foursquare, Netflix, Pinterest, Airbnb, and more, are down as it is experiencing “degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone” in the N. Virginia Zone.

Problems began at 10:38 AM PDT, and Amazon reports at that time “We are currently investigating degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

Then, at 11:11 AM PDT, the company updated its Service Health Dashboard: “We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.”

At 11:26 AM PDT, Amazon then said, “We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.”

This is not the first time this year Amazon has had issues with AWS and EC2 hosting. Back in June, Amazon experienced a massive outage that took down dozens of companies, including Netflix – and raised questions about how reliable Amazon is as a hosting provider.

But as I mentioned in June, companies must be able to build in resiliency so if and when AWS goes down again (and it will), these websites won’t be affected to the degree that sites like Reddit are currently experiencing.

Update: As of 1:02 PM PDT, Amazon reports “EC2 instances and EBS volumes outside of this availability zone are operating normally. Customers can launch replacement instances in the unaffected availability zones but may experience elevated launch latencies or receive ResourceLimitExceeded errors on their API calls, which are being issued to manage load on the system during recovery.”

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Where are my upboats and why have I resorted to commenting on Forbes? I miss you guys!!!

In any case, good article Kelly. Your quote “companies must be able to build in resiliency so if and when AWS goes down again (and it will,) these websites won’t be affected to the degree that sites like Reddit are currently experiencing.” is a valid point!

Well saving money and benefiting with all the great services of the Cloud Computing which is becoming huge in noways does not mean that the engineers of those companies should not have a Plan B for those expected downtime of the cloud. I believe reading the SLA two times would be a better understanding of them. Still a supporter of Cloud Computing -NK

This kind of downtime is totally unwarranted since there are plenty of technologies that allow anyone utilizing AWS to deal with outages with “Failover” by not putting all your servers in one facility and being able to switch to other datacenters in real time.

Here is a helpful tool available to the public free for realtime health status of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 in all regions http://www.systemswatch.com Good site to know quickly if its you are AWS.

If a site using any commercial cloud service goes down, it’s their own fault for not ensuring they’ve distributed their resources across the cloud. Why bother using cloud resources if you have all you instances in the same data center? Kind of defeats the purpose… This is as much a failure on Reddit’s part as Amazon’s.